SOPA, PIPA, and me?

SOPA, PIPA, and me.

As I was looking at Scott Johnson's latest Extralife web comic panel, I realized something. Those internet pirate bills, could very well effect me directly.

I don't usually think of myself as a content provider, or anything. But I actually am.

And, I do use small parts of other people's work within my own occasionally. In my poems mostly.

Think of it like a musician recording and producing a single, and he chooses to insert a little five second snippet of another song or something. It can give things an extra zip, or add context, or a familiar touchstone for people to reference within your own original related, or even unrelated work.

99.9% of my work on the poetry blog is original, I'll swear to it. But if you read enough of them, you'll see the odd quote, or something thrown in there.

Gosh, I just had a tangent thought, do I need to add a reference section in the back of my poetry book, in order to give credit to any line or quote that I've borrowed? Holy crap, I hadn't even thought of that. I wonder what the heck is allowed?

As a rule of thumb, I've heard, mostly from Mr. Tom Merritt, that if what you do is transformative, then it's ok to use little bits and pieces of things. But that sometimes, it takes a court case to prove you right, unfortunately

NOw that I've dropped his name, I probably butchered his intentions or something on that. If so I apologize ahead of time, and will edit immediately if required. I don't do much research ahead of time before writing a Warthog entry.

But back on the SOPA, PIPA track.

If an artist, or author read one or my poems on the Google Blogger, and took issue with how I used their words, or even their name maybe, I'll have to look into that one. I did make Jessica Alba into an underbed monster in one poem.

Anyways, if someone had a problem with what I wrote that was copyright related, under those two proposed law packages, they could complain, and I assume my blog site would be blocked. I don't get a chance to say a word about it before hand either.

The BS part of it, is that it doesn't matter if what I did was perfectly acceptable, and legal. If someone complains, it gets censored. The whole thing.

How messed up is that?

I'd heard numerous bad things about these bills, but never associated them with my own published content. I just was sad that many sites I like to visit may be effected.

This though, this changes everything.

Down with SOPA, down with PIPA.

The internets need to have some freedom to express themselves.

I've mentioned it before, relating to issues like this. There ARE existing laws on the books, that could be either enforced better, or tweaked slightly to cover the problems that copyright holders supposedly have.

But that is never anyone's solution, it's always just to add something else to our already bloated legal code system.

Give it a rest. Stop coddling corporations over people.

Cheers, before I get too carried away and write all damned day.